Views and analysis of Chinese politics and policy from inside China, outside the Beijing and Shanghai beltways

Friday, 7 July 2017

Talk About Pests

Local governance isn’t easy here.

There are flies.

And then there are flies.

In the first instance, the
“flies” [苍蝇] are the lower local ranks of the
Communist Party, particularly officials in the countryside, engaged in
corruption—that is, “flies”,
as opposed to “tigers” (political elites here in China).

There’s been renewed attention
to local corruption here lately, particularly its spillover. A
commentary in Nanjing Daily on
Tuesday noted that “some village cadres are not only corrupt, but also
arrogant” [一些村干部不仅贪腐，而且相当嚣张]. They exploit
farmers, loot
poverty alleviation funds, cheat on official expenses, and act less like
“village officials than village tyrants” [村官变成村霸].
The author argues that while they
may be “small officials, but their greed is gigantic.” [小官巨贪] and “although the power of local village officials is not
large, the lack of effective supervision will breed a more serious corruption
problem, causing adverse effects among villagers.” Residents who see
authorities unable to address low-level graft end up with less trust in local
government and in the Party generally, the commentary argues.

One reason for the hubris of
village officials, the commentary claims, is that there’s still no clear way to
hold them accountable.

For example, there are over
3,000 village party secretaries and directors in Jiangsu; so there aren’t
enough investigators in the province’s Commission for Discipline Inspection to
inspect their activity. (Left unsaid but surely implied is that investigators
have more than enough work in the upper ranks of provincial government here.
There’s ample
evidence of that locally in recent days.)

At the grassroots level, whistleblowers
[举报人] are often retaliated against by local officials.
Many villages are run by clans that have dominated for generations, the
commentary notes, and have intimidated
those who wish to bring about change. There’s an atmosphere of fear for
those who want to improve their locality but lack political protection.
Everyone in China knows about payback.

Efforts to make village
finances more transparent and thereby expose local corruption haven’t shooed
away many “flies” either. When records that might indicate graft are released
to residents, the essay argues, the accounting is often too complex for many
villagers to understand, or the bookkeeping is incomplete at best, rendering
inspection useless.

We've been here before.
What’s different is that this commentary thinks that “flies” can be swatted and shouldn’t be ignored
for the sake of caging tigers—that there are weapons available.

For example, using
“Big Data” to supervise village officials, instead of rural residents.
Efforts would be made to collect, collate and compare government subsidies
(such as poverty alleviation funds) with actual local expenditures, and use
those results as one of the main means to evaluate cadre performance, “so that
the village officials have no place to hide” [从而让村官贪腐无处遁形]. Discrepancies in these figures would mean
no political promotions until inspectors conducted their own investigations,
and heavier punishment for those caught cheating than exist currently.

The commentary also argues for
greater coordination between government bureaus and Party departments about who
gets appointed and elevated in rank. Often, village officials are promoted just
because a case couldn't be made about their malfeasance until later in their
careers; the warning signs were already there but not shared with the
responsible departments. Bad cadres end up getting ahead because not everyone
knew they were bad from the beginning, in part because information isn’t shared
across agencies and levels. Cooperation can help to crush “flies”.

And those other “flies”
mentioned above?

Those would be somewhat different—according to a cartoon
and brief discussion on the same editorial page about those “flies”, in this
case, 蝇扰--the sorts of
flying insects that buzz about, irritate, bite, and can spread disease.

While the commentary on the same page focuses on corruption,
the picture and caption are about rumors [谣言]--stories
flying around on the hot winds of summer, about fresh food not being so fresh,
fruit being dyed or injected with artificial substances, and other purported
hazards. According to the caption, such “lies” [掰谎] need to be thoroughly swatted down because they’re an
injustice [冤情] to the industry
and the consumer, and hazardous in themselves. The State shouldn't let them swarm, and officials need to do something about that.

At the very least, the latter type of fly diverts attention
from more crucial tasks of local governance.

And who’s supposed to do the
whacking anyway? Is it the authorities, or should it be residents? Both of these editorial forays insist that the response
should be top-down, rather than bottom-up.

Perhaps that's right: Officials should do the clean-up work, not the public. Let swatting, not dialogue, be the solution.

Then again, maybe that’s the reason
that one sees so many flies about these days.

2 comments:

For the rumours problem, I wonder whether the editorial intention is to soften the ground so as to get the public's agreement when the government clamp down on alternative sources of information such as those on WeChat, or is it really truly hoping the government can do more in dispelling rumours. I guess it could be both.

Thanks very much for your take on this issue. I think that it is likely to be both--not as a coordinated strategy so much, but the result of unreconciled views in the policymaking apparatus. By going after rumours, both hardliners and others get their shout, and see their views put into place. Of course, it's also true that there's a real concern with losing authority over the main narrative.